Reddit quarantined: can changing platform affordances reduce hateful material online?

Abstract

This paper studies the efficacy of the Reddit's quarantine, increasingly implemented in the platform as a means of restricting and reducing misogynistic and other hateful material. Using the case studies of r/TheRedPill and r/Braincels, the paper argues the quarantine successfully cordoned off affected subreddits and associated hateful material from the rest of the platform. It did not, however, reduce the levels of hateful material within the affected spaces. Instead many users reacted by leaving Reddit for less regulated spaces, with Reddit making this hateful material someone else's problem. The paper argues therefore that the success of the quarantine as a policy response is mixed. Issue 4This paper is part of Trust in the system, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guestedited by Péter Mezei and Andreea Verteş-Olteanu.Content moderation is an integral part of the political economy of large social media platforms (Gillespie, 2018). While social media companies position themselves as platforms which offer unlimited potential of free expression (Gillespie, 2010), these same sites have always engaged in some form of content moderation (Marantz, 2019). In recent years, in response to increasing pressure from the public, lawmakers and advertisers, many large social media companies have given up much of their free speech rhetoric and have become more active in regulating abusive, misogynistic, racist and homophobic language on their platforms. This has occurred in particular through banning and restricting users and channels (Marantz, 2019). In 2018 for example, a number of large social media companies banned the high-profile conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his platform InfoWars from their platforms (Hern, 2018), while in 2019 the web infrastructure company Cloudflare deplatformed the controversial site 8chan (Prince, 2019). In 2020 a number of platforms even began regulating material from President Donald Trump, with Twitter placing fact-checks and warnings on some of his tweets and the platform Twitch temporarily suspending his account (Copland and Davis, 2020).As one of the largest digital platforms in the world, Reddit has not been immune from this pressure. Built upon a reputation of being a bastion of free speech (Ohanian, 2013), Reddit has historically resisted censoring its users, despite the prominence of racist, misogynistic, homophobic and explicitly violent material on the platform (for examples,

Recommender systems and the amplification of extremist content

“…It is also important to note that we find there to be minimal filtering of extreme content on both Reddit and Gab. However, we do find evidence of both extreme and fringe content on all three platforms-supported by research which posits the far-right as existing on the sites (O'Callaghan et al, 2015;Berger, 2018b;Lewis, 2018;Conway, Scrivens, and Macnair, 2019;Nouri, Lorenzo-Dus, and Watkin, 2019;Copland, 2020;Gaudette et al, 2020). For Reddit and Gab, the lack of algorithmic promotion suggests that there are other factors, possibly related to the platforms' other affordances or their user bases, that drive extreme content.…”

“…Reddit (Conway, 2016;Copland, 2020;Gaudette et al, 2020), and Gab (Berger, 2018b;Conway, Scrivens, and Macnair, 2019;Nouri, Lorenzo-Dus, and Watkin, 2019).…”

Da manosphere à machosfera

“…O subreddit /r/TheRedPill foi colocado em quarentena em 28 de setembro de 2018 devido a uma escalada de seu discurso violento. Para o Reddit, a quarentena dessa comunidade é reveladora de uma pressão do público, de instâncias legislativas e dos anunciantes para a diminuição do ódio favorecido pela retórica de livre expressão da plataforma (Copland, 2020). Para Simon Copland 22 A metáfora de desplugar é uma referência ao filme The Matrix.…”

“…Por alto, a manosphere se divide entre facções de masculinidades conservadoras, ou alpha, e masculinidades nerds, ou betas (Ging, 2017); o que nos parece um espelho imperfeito da relação entre altright e alt-light, respectivamente. E ainda, essa dinâmica interna de masculinidades parece bem afinada com as discussões de Raewyn Connel (2013) Há ainda outros grupos que parecem se constituir em masculinidades híbridas das anteriores, como é o caso do Men Going Their Own Way 29 (MGTOW), que deu nome a uma comunidade homônima no Reddit colocada em quarentena em 2019 (Copland, 2020). Diz-se também de agrupamentos que estão teorizando uma nova masculinidade que "transcenderia" a biologia e que não teria espaço na Dossiê Guerras Culturais -https://revistaecopos.eco.ufrj.br/ ISSN 2175-8689 -v. 24, n. 2, 2021 DOI: 10.29146/ecopos.v24i2.27703 atual hierarquia.…”

From trust in the system to trust in the content

“…Next we have Simon Copland's paper 'Reddit quarantined: can changing platform affordances reduce hateful material online?' (Copland, 2020), which proposes an analytical reflection on the question: how can a digital platform known as a bastion of free speech, one of the last giants to resist homogeneity (which comes with the in-herent price of having to "stomach" the occasional troll reddit, in the words of Erik Martin, former Reddit CEO) respond to the increasing pressure to regulate abusive language and online behaviour? Reddit was imagined as a place for open and honest conversations; however, these days, the 'trolls' seem to be winning.…”